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Passage Illustrated

"I should like to be," said I, glancing at the slate as he held it: with a
misgiving that the writing was rather hilly.

"Why, here's a J," said Joe, "and a O equal to anythink! Here's a J and a
O, Pip, and a J-O, Joe."

I had never heard Joe read aloud to any greater extent than this
monosyllable, and I had observed at church last Sunday when I accidentally held our
Prayer-Book upside down, that it seemed to suit his convenience quite as well as if it
had been all right. Wishing to embrace the present occasion of finding out whether in
teaching Joe, I should have to begin quite at the beginning, I said, "Ah! But read the
rest, Jo."

"The rest, eh, Pip?" said Joe, looking at it with a slowly searching eye,
"One, two, three. Why, here's three Js, and three Os, and three J-O, Joes in it,
Pip!"

I leaned over Joe, and, with the aid of my forefinger, read him the whole
letter.

"Astonishing!" said Joe, when I had finished. "You are a
scholar."

"How do you spell Gargery, Joe?" I asked him, with a modest patronage.

"On-common. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit
me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his
knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, "Here, at last, is a J-O,
Joe," how interesting reading is!" [Chapter 7]

Related Illustrations in Other Editions, 1860 through 1910

Left: John McLennan's "At such times as your sister
is on the ram-page, Pip" (1860). Centre: Darley's earlier "Household" Edition
illustration, "The Sergeant ran in first when he had run the noise
quite down" (vol. 1, 1861). Right: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s "Joe
and Mrs. Joe Gargarey" (1867). [Click on images to enlarge them.]

Commentary

Since adult literacy was a major social as well as an educational and
commercial concern in both Great Britain and America in the 1860s, prior, that, is to
such governmental; initiatives as The Elementary Education Act of England and Wales
(1870) and the founding of the United States Office of Education (1869), especially
across the Atlantic since foreign-language speakers had to be integrated both socially
and politically, it is surprising that so few of Dickens's illustrators have focussed on
Joe's illiteracy, and his learning his letters second-hand through his young
brother-in-law, Pip. Although Harry Furniss does not realise Joe's early "lack of
letters," he does show Joe laboriously penning a letter to his second wife from London in
the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910). Although not as effective as Darley's
touching illustration of diminutive Pip teaching the muscular young adult Joe to read in
the kitchen after dark (as signified by the candle (right) and the deep chiaroscuro
surrounding both figures, F. A., Fraser's Household
Edition illustration of the same moment underscores that, even well into the decade
of the 1870s adult literacy was still very much alive as a social issue. Both Fraser and
Darley also capture the irony of the child's acting as the teacher of an adult, an irony
exploited by Dickens himself in depicting such characters as Amy Dorrit and Maggy in
Little Doirrit (1857).

Darley's Joe in both his Household Edition frontispiece of 1861 and his later
character study is appealing not merely in his youthful and vigorous manliness but also
in terms of the closeness of his relationship with Pip, whom he carries on his shoulders
as the soldiers pursue the escaped convicts across the Medway marshes in
The Sergeant ran
in first when he had run the noise quite down. One notes in the later study,
too, Darley's fondness for detailing the background context credibly, such elements of
the domestic sphere as the pots, pans, pewter mugs, and bellows contributing to the
scene as they establish the humble nature of the readers. Joe has laid aside his pipe
(right) in order to study what Pip has written for him on the slate, and his expression
reflects Pip's intellectual engagement while suggesting his puzzlement. The initial
illustrators, Marcus Stone and
John McLenan both convey a strong sense of the
relationship between young Pip and childlike, good-natured Joe at the fireside, but do
not specifically address Pip's becoming Joe's literacy coach.